Measuring the sustainability and resilience of blood supply chains

Blood supply chains (BSCs) play a strategic and crucial role in healthcare systems especially in unexpected situations such as earthquakes and pandemic outbreaks. Nevertheless, measuring the sustainability and resilience of BSCs is a major challenge for many decision-makers in healthcare systems. To this end, this paper presents an advanced network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) method to evaluate the sustainability and resilience of BSCs. We deal with BSCs, including blood collection centers (BCCs), blood production centers (BPCs), and blood distribution centers (BDCs). A new directional distance function (DDF) is also developed for evaluating both the overall and stage efficiency scores. Our proposed model can deal with different types of data, including integers, undesirable outputs, negative, zero, and positive. The undesirable outputs are the outputs that adversely impact the performance of DMUs. Moreover, the developed method addresses the sustainability and resilience of BSCs. A case study is provided to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model.